Dr. Emmet Fox : New Thought Pioneer

Emmet Fox was born in Ireland on July 30, 1886, was educated in England, pursued his spiritual career mostly in the United States, and died in France on August 13, 1951.

His father, who died before Fox was ten, was a physician and member of Parliament. Fox attended Stamford Hill Jesuit college near London, and became an electrical engineer. However, he early discovered that he had healing power, and from the time of his late teens studied New Thought. He came to know the prominent New Thought writer Thomas Troward.

Fox attended the London meeting at which the International New Thought Alliance was organized in 1914. He gave his first New Thought talk in Mortimer Hall in London in 1928. Soon he went to the United States, and in 1931 was selected to become the successor to the James Murray as the minister of New York’s Church of the Healing Christ. Fox became immensely popular, and spoke to audiences in some of the largest halls in the city. He was ordained in the Divine Science branch of New Thought.

While Emmet Fox lived he addressed some of the largest audiences ever gathered to hear one man’s thoughts on the religious meaning of life. His books and pamphlets have been distributed to over three million people and it can be conservatively estimated that they have come into the hands of ten million.

Fox’s secretary was the mother of one of the men who worked with Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, and partly as a result of this connection early AA groups often went to hear Fox. His writing, especially “The Sermon on the Mount,” became popular in AA.

The influence of Emmet Fox in the spread of New Thought ideas and emphases lies not simply in the large number of his readers, but in the fact that he is so widely read my ministers of all denominations. A check in large denominational bookstores in various cities from time to time has revealed that Emmet Fox’s books are in constant demand; and these are the stores in which ministers chiefly buy their books. They do not, of course, read it as New Thought, but they buy it and read it. There is nothing sectarian, certainly, in the titles “The Sermon on the Mount” and “The Ten Commandments,” nor is there anything about them outwardly to indicate that they are New Thought, and nearly half a century after his death, the writings of Emmet Fox remain influential.